LimeWire's Mark Gorton Brings Open-Source To Urban Planning

mytrip writes to tell us that Mark Gorton of LimeWire fame is translating his knowledge from moving bits to moving people. Taking profits earned from his software business, Gorton is applying them to projects aimed at making urban transportation safer, faster, and more sustainable. "That's not the only connection between open-source software and Gorton's vision for livable cities. The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he's lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people's needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens. Gorton's open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area."

skyscraperpage .... and the like

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an active forum on skyscraperpage that loves watching urban development projects.

Since there's an OCD community for every field.....perhaps this can be used to draw on their contributive energy.

Re:Take the A train

[MacColossus]

Mod Parent up. I work in a college with vast amounts of students running Limewire on their personal machines. Have yet to see one without a virus or trojan. We provide Sophos antivirus for free. We require windows updates before they can join the campus wireless. we have crosstalk between machines on the LAN disabled so they can't automagicly infect each other as they did in the blaster and welchia days. It's all for not and worthless the minute Limewire is loaded. Good magic. At least with most bittorrent they stand a chance of being malware free.

Re:Urban Planning

[jd]

No, the Oxy Moron is the person who hires an urban planner.

I work for TOPP

[dmayle]

Wow, pretty cool to be on Slashdot (I work for The Open Planning Project).

With regards to open source, we try to tackle the problem from all sides. We try to create free and open standards for data, we lobby for said standards in government usage of data, and we try to supply the best of breed open source software that uses that data.

For the most part, the various governments aren't competing with each other for software, so open source makes tons of sense. In addition, the software support business model works very well for governments, because they want to keep this going, and most proprietary shops get bored with supporting a single large customer.

With regards to urban planning, our original plan was just to open up the urban planning data and see where that got us, but we've actually been spending a lot of time looking at other cities that have already have better urban planning. Amsterdam, Paris, Bogota. Jan Gehl (one of the great moving forces behind better urban planning) basically said that since you can never satisfy all desire for cars (which make up a minority of the population anyway) it's better to scale back just a tiny bit the attention spent on cars and instead concentrate on the people. Since cars take up so much space, scaling back on cars just a small amount opens up huge possibilities for people.

And also, working for TOPP is great! We do cool things, work on open source, support great causes, and the parties are kick-ass too!